Sellers, buyers, and lessors of property are familiar with the difficulty of getting text brochures describing an item for sale or rent into the hands of the interested potential buyer. One common solution is the box having a number of brochures or flyers within it. Real estate is the area in which this device frequently appears: a home for sale may well have a “FOR SALE” yard sign, with or without a rider (a smaller sign attached to the main sign), and a box or tube which is supposed to contain flyers for interested parties to take when they notice the house. The problems with this system are numerous, the single most important problem being that the box is empty more often than it contains flyers. Replenishing the boxes of flyers is a hit or miss business at best and is time intensive, even if passers by and potential buyers take only one flyer each.
It would be advantageous to provide a system by which a potential buyer may see a text brochure on a property quickly without these disadvantages. Various solutions have been considered for this.
One potential solution is the replacement of the original flyer box with a recorded audio message, which may be broadcast by low power radio or made available to those calling a certain number. One disadvantage of such a system is that there is no possibilities of putting the facts actually in the hands of the potential buyer, a larger disadvantage in terms of sales psychology is that people like to see photographs of the item they are interested in buying. A different potential solution is the ‘fax back’ in which an interested party places a call and an automatic system sends a fax in response. The disadvantage of this system is that the interested party is most interested at the moment they actually are at the home, vehicle, etc, or the moment when they see the advertisement of that item, and there is little chance that the typical individual will be able to immediately receive a fax as a result.
It would be preferable if text and images of an item for sale or lease (such as a home) could be distributed immediately to interested parties, without the requirement of a fax machine or the like.
One possible response, recently invented by the individual also named as inventor of the present invention, is the SMS text message response system. Such systems use an SMS text message access number on a real estate “rider” type sign (a small sign placed on top of a yard sign) to make potential buyers aware that they may receive in reply an SMS text message. Two examples of this earlier invention (being used in the marketplace beginning in 2005 and no earlier) may be found at www.phoneflyer.com and www.house4cell.com. Both of these have pioneered within the period of months prior to the present application, and in the earlier case, shortly after the inventor explained the system to the individual who then set up the Phoneflyer (tm) system.
These systems still have certain difficulties, however. First and foremost is the fact that numerous potential home buyers, vehicle buyers, and other buyers will not voluntarily send or do not know how to send an SMS text message, for reasons such as the irritation of pushing telephone buttons multiple times in order to get the desired letter of the alphabet of a single word of a message. In addition to that fact, while these systems claim that a reply may be received in “seconds”, in point of fact this is not the nature of SMS text messaging. In normal use, SMS messages receive a lower priority of handling from telecommunication providers than do voice communications, so SMS messages may enter a queue rather than being sent directly to the intended recipient. Multiplied by a factor of two (once for the SMS message requesting information and once for the return message) the result is that the interested party may have to wait for hours prior to receiving their response message, if they even bother to text message out the desire for a text brochure, media brochure or the like.
Thus it would be advantageous to provide a system by which a user may receive a response in seconds rather minutes or hours and with a high degree of certitude.
It would further be advantageous to provide a system by which a user may request the text brochure of information about the sale item without the necessity of sending an original text message requesting the text brochure.
It would further be advantageous to provide a system by which a database of potential buyer information or a “prospect database” may be created and accessed.
It would be further be advantageous to provide access to properties for sale, including views of the item not normally visible to a casual observes, such as interior view of buildings or vehicles.
It would further be advantageous to provide a system by which a consumer user can opt in to receive similar text/media brochures on similar items for sale or lease.
It would further be advantageous to increase the probability of successful completion of a customer contact by not relying exclusively on SMS protocols.